


Somebody Holds the Key

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bisexual Character, Character of Color, Episode: s01e13 Route 666, LGBTQ Character of Color, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-18
Updated: 2010-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:12:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's one attempt at a long-term relationship was with Charlie Robinson, a journalism student in Athens, Ohio.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somebody Holds the Key

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/profile)[**elanurel**](http://elanurel.livejournal.com/) for the beta! Some of the action and dialogue toward the end was lifted/slightly altered from the episode "Route 666." Title from "Can't Find My Way Home," which was featured in the episode.

Being in a college town made Dean feel like every tall, lanky kid he passed could be Sam.

He and Dad were in Ohio working a haunting in the old Athens State Hospital buildings, but the university had the best local history records, and Dad had assigned Dean to the research end of things. Never mind that they were thousands of miles from Stanford, it was still big classroom buildings and and kids sprawled out on the quad with their backpacks for pillows.

Dean wasn't especially fond of old mental hospitals, truth be told. Made him think about people locked up for doing things Dean did all the time, for believing in things Dean knew were true. All he really wanted to do was get in, gank whatever had to be ganked and get the fuck out. Unfortunately, between recon and research and the reports that had drawn them to Athens, it was looking like the old buildings were full of spirits. Some were just restless, others full-on evil, and it wasn't always easy to tell the difference.

The level of activity had been cranking up as the city rehabilitated the buildings, getting them ready to be offices or some crap. Dean couldn't imagine going to work every day, sitting in front of a computer stuck in a room where hundreds of poor bastards had got their brains cut into. Then again, he couldn't really imagine working that kind of a regular job no matter where it was. A week of going in to the Ohio U. library every day was bad enough, giving himself a headache with old microfilm reels and oversized books of bound records.

He was trying and failing to get a piece of microfiche turned around the right way in the reader when a guy leaned over him, plucked the fiche out of his fingers and positioned it between the glass plates. He pushed it in, and finally the words weren't upside down and backwards. Dean looked up, torn between thanking the guy and telling him to fuck the hell off, and found he couldn't do either. The guy was completely freaking hot, mocha-colored skin and broad shoulders and sharp dark eyes. Dean didn't notice men that often, but he was far from immune.

"Hey," Dean croaked, his throat tight. "Thanks, man. You sure know your away around the fiche." He cringed, knowing he sounded like a pathetic dork.

The guy sat down in the chair next to Dean's and held out his hand. "Charlie Robinson, best investigative reporter on the staff of the campus newspaper." Dean shook his hand, and the guy's grip was strong and solid, even if he was a little on the short and scrawny side by Winchester standards. Charlie grinned and held up a handful of microfiche envelopes. "Research is my crack."

"Dean Winchester." Dean tilted his head, looked at the rainbow beads on Charlie's leather bracelet. Heat stirred in his stomach, and he smirked. "I can think of some things I like a _whole_ lot better than research."

"Oh yeah?" Charlie smirked right back, and Dean knew right then that he was _so_ getting laid.

~~~

Charlie's apartment was off-campus. He had his own tiny bedroom and shared the rest of the place with a couple of other guys. Most of his room was taken up by a thick queen size mattress that was flat on the floor, and that worked just fine as far as Dean was concerned. They tumbled down onto the mattress, pulling at each other's clothes, and Dean took back his thought about Charlie being scrawny. Underneath his geeky polo shirt he was all wiry muscle, and Dean wrestled him down onto his back.

Charlie dug condoms and lube out of a shoebox in his milk crate bedside table, and Dean took them both. It had been long enough since he last got fucked that it burned when he pushed his ass down over Charlie's cock, but Dean didn't care. He just let it go to his head like a shot of moonshine sweetened by the grip of Charlie's hand around his cock and kept riding until they both came.

They fell asleep together, but Dean woke up first. When he found himself looking at Charlie's lax face and wanting to know more about him, wanting to see him again, his first thought was to run. Then he sighed and traced his fingers over the lines of Charlie's hipbones. He and Dad were going to be in Athens for a couple weeks, after all, and it wasn't like Dean didn't know how not to get attached.

The world wouldn't end if he took the time to have some fun, get to know this guy. Charlie.

They went to dinner and talked a hell of a lot more than Dean usually did on a date. He spun his story about being a specialty building contractor, traveling with his father. His usual favorite cover story of being private investigators would be too close for comfort with a guy like Charlie and given that they were probably going to be knocking some walls down in those old buildings, it wasn't entirely a lie. After dinner, Dean went off to help dig graves, and Charlie went off to work on laying out pages

Dean slept in the motel room that night, but he skipped out on sharing the room with Dad for over a week afterward. His new routine was showering in the room to get rid of the grave dirt or plaster dust or cobwebs or whatever crap was all over him and then heading over to meet Charlie at the library. He told Charlie he was taking a couple of classes online, working on a research paper, and Charlie smiled. Dean pushed down the worry about what Charlie would think about fucking a guy with a GED; he never needed to know.

~~~

Ten days later, Dean and Charlie were tangled up in bed, a little bit buzzed on some quality beer and a little bit high off Charlie's roommate's weed. Dean didn't think he'd be in town much longer, but he didn't want to leave the thing he'd found with Charlie entirely behind. For the first time in a long time, it really bothered him, the idea of leaving a lie behind, the reality that Charlie didn't even know who Dean really was.

Charlie was talking about a research paper he was working on, digging up local urban legends and exposing them as false.

"You never know," Dean said, "some of those stories have a basis in fact. Can be good to keep an eye out."

Charlie laughed. "What? I never took you for such a sucker."

"Sucker?" Dean sat up and looked hard at Charlie. "You don't know the things I've seen."

Charlie just laughed again, annoyingly gorgeous as he did so, the column of his neck stretched up from his bare chest. "What, ghosts and goblins?"

"And werewolves and witches and poltergeists. I hunt evil things, and I help keep dumbasses like you safe from all of it."

Charlie stopped laughing. "Are you serious?"

Dean felt his heart pounding in his chest because this was so far against the rules, but he couldn't turn back, couldn't let it go. "Dead serious. It's what I do, what my family does. I'm sorry I kinda lied to you before, but it's not something we tell just anybody."

Charlie pulled further away from Dean, reached out and pulled his t-shirt on. "Uh, yeah. Because people will think you're crazy."

"I'm not crazy. This shit's as real as me or you."

"Oh, no." Charlie shook his head, stood up and pulled on his jeans. "We've got two options here--either you're joking, in which case you're an asshole and you better 'fess up, or you're crazy, in which case I need you to leave."

Dean felt more naked than his lack of clothes could account for. He pulled on his shirt then put his feet into his jeans and pulled them up as he stood. As he shoved his feet into his shoes, he pulled his notepad and pen out of his back pocket and wrote down his phone number.

"I hope you get to keep thinking I'm wrong, I do. But something ever happens to make you think you need help from a psycho asshole like me?" He ripped off the page and held it out for Charlie to take. "Keep it. Call me."

Charlie shoved the number in his pocket but his face was hard, implacable. He looked as stone-cold sober as Dean felt, and then Dean turned away and walked out of the apartment, back to the Impala.

When he walked into the motel room, hours before he'd normally turn up, Dad gave him a long look before patting him on the shoulder. "You hungry for breakfast?"

"Jesus, Dad, it's late afternoon."

"Gotta be somewhere serving breakfast in this town. You coming?"

Breakfast was Winchester comfort food---eggs and pancakes and a cavalcade of pork products. "Yeah," Dean sighed. "I guess I am."

~~~

More than two years had passed between leaving Charlie in that room and getting the voicemail message from him, and Dean had long since beaten the idea of finding any kind of lasting relationship with anybody, man or woman, out of his head. He never had trouble finding a quick fuck or a warm bed, and he figured he'd be dead before he got old enough to make that a problem. Hearing Charlie's voice, still warm but with an edge of worry Dean had never heard before--Dean wanted to tell himself that he didn't feel anything but the second he opened his mouth to talk to Sam he knew that what he felt was pissed off.

Sam's gaping face when Dean told him they were changing plans didn't help.

"Just got a call from, uh, an old friend. His father was killed last night, and he thinks it might be our kind of thing. Believe me, he never would have called, _never_, if he didn't need us."

As nonspecific as Dean managed to keep it, he could see the look in Sam's eyes, see that even after only a few months back on the road together the kid knew him way too fucking well. They got in the car, and Dean felt like Sam was boring holes in his head with his freaky mind powers, trying to get more information beyond the basics Dean had given him.

"So, by old friend you mean...?"

"A friend that's not new."

"Yeah, thanks. So, _his_ name is Charlie, huh? You never mentioned _him_."

Dean wanted to reach out and smack Sam over the super special emphasis he was putting on the pronouns, but he kept his hands on the wheel. "Didn't I?"

"Uh, no!"

"Yeah." Dean glanced over at Sam and then back at the road. "We went out."

"You dated a guy? Wait, wait, you dated someone for more than one night?"

Dean wanted to pull the car over, dump Sam on the side of the road, swear to God, until he realized that Sam sounded more shocked by Dean's attempt at a long-term relationship than by the fact that it was with a dude. "Am I speaking a language you're not getting here?"

Sam barked out a laugh and then went quiet. "No. No, I hear you. So, was this guy a hunter or what?"

"No way. Dad and I were on a job, he was finishing up college."

"So how does he know what we do?"

Fuck, Dean should have known that Sam would pick this to flip out over. He kept his eyes locked on the road.

"You told him. You told him? The secret? Our big family rule number one, we do what we do, and we shut up about it." The bitterness in Sam's voice was so thick that Dean could taste it. "For a year and a half I do nothing but lie to Jessica, and you go out with this guy in Ohio a couple of times and you tell him _everything_?" Sam slapped his hand on the bench seat between them when Dean didn't answer. "Dean!"

"Yeah," Dean bit out the word. "Looks like it."

Sam stewed in angry silence all the way to Port Girardeau. Contrary bitch that he was, Sam didn't smile until Charlie was walking toward them, eyeing up Dean and casting an appraising glance over Sam. Charlie--Charles, as he introduced himself to Sam--looked good. He filled out his suit, a little bulk from home cooking sitting well on him. The rainbow bracelet wasn't in evidence, but Dean wasn't in a position to call him out on that.

The next night, riding Charlie just like that first time but on a real bed in a nice room filled with real furniture, Dean could still feel the difference between Charlie and every other one-night-stand he'd been with in the intervening years. A real relationship, something permanent, wasn't the kind of thing Dean thought was in the cards for him, but he couldn't help feeling the pull of wanting it. Just this once, just right there, with somebody who knew what he did, who had to believe.

But the next day, in the cold light of morning, Charlie--Charles--shut him down just as effectively as he had back in Ohio. Still, they kissed good-bye, right there in front of God and Sam and everybody else in Cape Girardeau. Charlie looked a little abashed as they stepped apart from each other, but he didn't turn away until Dean got into the passenger seat and let Sam drive him away.

"I liked him," Sam said as they drove past the city limits sign.

"Yeah." Dean sighed. Sam _would_ have to decide he approved after things were over and done with.

"Hey," Sam's voice went oddly quiet, hesitant. "Does Dad know?"

"You think there's much we ever did that man didn't figure out sooner or later?" Sam opened his mouth like he was going to protest, and Dean held up a hand. "When you first got to Stanford you dated a short, dark haired girl, and then you got a C in one of your classes and spent the next two semesters living like a monk, didn't date anybody else until Jess."

"What the fuck?" Sam's voice was high, shocked.

"I wasn't in California at all that year, dude. Dad keeps tabs like a parole officer. He didn't say anything, never would, but I'm pretty damn sure he knew."

"Huh." Sam nodded and adjusted the sun visor to block some of the late morning sunlight.

"Yeah." Dean pulled on his sunglasses and slumped into the comfortable curve of the seat. "Wake me up when it's my turn to drive."


End file.
